Peter Hennessey: The artist as astronaut

By Robert Nelson

Without knowing what they represent, you could be forgiven for thinking that Peter Hennessey’s sculptures at Tolarno Gallery are toys. Conceived in knock-down assembly, they are made of layers of plywood connected by bolts. Everything is fitted together as if from a kit, with perfectly machined components.

The artist may want you to think they are toys, at least momentarily. He has populated them with tiny, white figurines, the kind of toy-soldier figure children used to play with before the age of virtual warfare with avatars.

Despite this naive mechanical language, Hennessy’s objects are not toys. Instead, they faithfully reproduce satellites and information equipment, like the Google-car camera that resembles a panopticon.

Advertisement

Launched by rockets at great expense, there are large numbers of satellites in orbit, some of which assist global communication in their constantly evolving technologies and spread, while others are sinister military outfits designedfor spying.

Any satellite which performs a service for telecommunications and GPS can double for secret duty on the side. More and more information is available to us and it follows that the same exponential growth in unauthorised reconnaissance is occurring, tracking anything and everything.

Enter the artist as astronaut. Hennessey has gained access to plans and images of these sinister stellar helpmates and, possessing the diagrams, he has been able to create scale versions, sometimes life-size, of the originals in the sky.

A toy designer could not have so much imagination in creating a satellite, the prototypes are too bizarre and uncannily recall artistic traditions. The arrays of features are fertile, a counterpoint of Gothic pinnacles and turrets, techno-gargoyles that just happen to have a practical application.

Like ancient architectural ornaments that ward off evil, the inventions suggest multiple functions, with faith in a motherboard behind them. The parley of protuberances is designed not for aerodynamic reasons - because there’s no air in their orbit - but for beaming and receiving coded data.

Among the codes are the natural languages of the globe. Hennessey has followed the blueprints for Russian, Chinese, EU and American satellites. They are space robots that relay languages, as well as geographical information, which make relatively little progress from century to century. On the one hand, the satellites reflect the most advanced engineering of their age but on the other, they still mirror the continuing culture that brought them into being. Between mother tongue and motherboard lies a great contradiction of archaic conservatism and technological progress.

The technology of a satellite is still admirable but the rocket science of their flight into space lacks the transcendence of the digital and, compared to the data transfers they manage, their take-off appears to us to be primitive. To propel themselves into the heavens, the rockets rely on the combustion of inordinate amounts of fossil fuel.

In small sculptural works, Hennessey models the vast smoke plume of the rocket during take-off. The energy involved is like a bomb going off, except that the cloud that billows outward in roiling convolutions is led by a phallic spike in the middle, which is the track immediately left by the jet engines.

You wouldn’t call the pattern beautiful so much as fascinatingly irksome, as it traces the dynamics of the thrust that depends entirely on the reaction Newton already described in the 17th century. Hennessey relishes this regression to the awful side of physics, the hideous bathos of spewing gases that hiss and befoul the air like the coils of a dragon.

Behind the sophistication of the robotic spacecraft is this barbarous campfire, akin to an explosion, a huge burn that gives televisual spectators a vicarious power-kick which no fire on Guy Fawkes’ night can rival.

Hennessey takes sculpture into space with both serenity and fury. The art works retain the boyish charm of a wooden constructions set and we’re allowed to marvel at what progress can achieve. But, beneath the euphoria, he portrays the existential disappointment, the pathos of an industrial ceremony that symbolises the consumption of energy and the competitive prowess of nations ahead of any benefit to anyone who needs clean water and bread.